Here you can learn about my science results
and interests, and also contact me.

My scientific interests are:

Star and planet formation, disk evolution

Exoplanets and life in the Universe

Infrared and multi-wavelength astronomy

machine learning and computational bayesian statistics

Space data science

Bruno Merín’s CV

Born in 1975, in Madrid, Spain.

Degree in Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), in 1998.

Pre-doctoral stay at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, (Cambridge MA) in 2002.

Ph.D. Thesis at LAEFF and UAM, in 2004.

Post-doctoral Fellow from Fundación Areces at Leiden Observatory, from 2004 to 2006.

ESA Research Fellow at ESTEC from 2006 to 2008

Working at ESA since 2008, working as Herschel Data Processing Scientist until June 2015.

Astronomy Archives Science Lead at the ESAC Science Data Centre since July 2015.

Head of the ESAC Science Data Centre since March 2018

Curriculum Vitae

LAEFF

I finished my Physics degree in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on June 1998, with a specialization in Theoretical Physics. After that, I joined LAEFF (“Laboratorio de Astrofisica Espacial y Fisica Fundamental”) of INTA, the Spanish National Technical Institute for Aerospace, where I did my Master and Ph.D. Thesis under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Montesinos and Prof. Carlos Eiroa.

The subject of my Ph.D. thesis was to study the evolution of the circumstellar disks around intermediate mass stars, the so-called Herbig Ae/Be stars,…

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrosphysics

During my Ph.D. Thesis I was lucky enough to travel to Morelia, Mexico, to have a collaboration with Dr. Paola D’Alessio, a world-known expert in the physics of protoplanetary disks and author of one of the best numerical models to physically reproduce the observations of such type of objects. After that experience, I was then invited by Profs. Nuria Calvet and Lee Hartman to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)…

Leiden observatory

After two years at Leiden observatory, I obtained an ESA Research Fellowship to work with Dr. Timo Prusti at the Research and Scientific Support Department of ESTEC, from the European Space Agency, at Noordwijk, in the Netherlands, and continued to work closely with the Leiden and c2d team members, given the proximity of ESTEC and Leiden.

During that time, I also got involved in the testing team of the Mid Infrared Instrument MIRI for the James Webb Space Telescope, which took place at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford in…

Herschel Science Center

Since October 2008, I am part of the Herschel Science Centre, the science operations center of the Herschel Space Observatory, located at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) of the European Space Agency, near Madrid, in Spain. Here I was Data Processing scientist and chair of the Data Processing Users’ Group, a body the coordinated the user input and feeds it back into the development plan for the Herschel data reduction software, called HIPE.

ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC)

Since March 2018 I am the head of the ESAC Science Data Centre, in charge of developing and operating the science mission archives for all ESA science missions, including Heliophysics, Planetary and Astronomy missions.

Publications and publication statistics

I am coauthor of 101 refereed papers, which have been cited in another 6,476 papers. My H-factor is 41 and I am coauthor of one of the top-10 most cited papers in Astronomy in 2010, the Spitzer “cores to disks” c2d summary paper by Evans et al. 2009.

I was member of the Data Analysis Working Group, which is tasked at providing detailed recommendations on data processing issues to the JWST Advisory Committee (JSTAC).

Outreach / Media

Since I joined ESA, I have participated in a number of outreach initiatives, which aimed at sharing the fascination of doing astronomy nowadays with the general public. These collaborations have been always done in Spanish and amount to two articles in the top-audience general newspaper “El País”:

Collaborators

There is a good number of scientists working at ESAC who study star- and planet formation. The environment favors the interaction with planetary scientists involved in ESA’s mission to planets and other bodies of the Solar System and with Data Scientists interested in applying modern Machine Learning techniques to the wealth of high quality scientific data in our Science Data Archives. If you fit any of those groups, do consider applying!!

Trainees, Master and/or Ph.D. students and post-docs:

Want to join us? Check here for applying to an ESA Research Fellowship (Deadline 1 Oct 2019) or here for applying for an ESAC Science Traineeship (Deadline in the fall).